[HOT] Pakistan Anti-Mapping Legislation: Implications for HOT/OSM

Faisal Chohan faisal at cogilent.com
Mon Nov 26 06:31:13 GMT 2012


On a general terms:

1. Laws are never implemented on powerful persons or entities in Pakistan.
Laws are for general public and implemented on them harshly. And when an
ordinary person gets into these cases there is no way out. It destroys all
of his/her life and career.

Specific to the mapping. I am not a lawyer but this is my observation,

1. The local laws do not affect the people living out-side Pakistan, unless
they do not enter in Pakistan. e.g in one instance a case is registered
against facebook founder, but it does not mean anything for the facebook
founder. The only problem with the case is that the facebook founder cannot
enter in Pakistan without clearing from this case.

This directly harms the Pakistani IT community and people. As Facebook will
never build a physical office in Pakistan due to this case. The powerful
and rich people will have their children studying in US and then get access
to the employment in companies like facebook but a general person will not.

The only problem with international projects like openstreetmap is that
most of the implementations are carried out by local people. And once they
cannot be involved into these projects, there seems distant possibility of
any substantial projects initiated or completed.

2. We were doing on-ground mapping in Pakistan especially our TED prize
winner project "SaafPindi". After reading this news we have stopped on
ground mapping and are not updating open street map from Friday on-wards.
 We are just pondering different options.

Thanks,

Faisal Chohan

TED Senior Fellow | www.ted.com/fellows
Disaster and open data mapper | www.pakreport.org
Co-Founder | www.BrightSpyre.com
Co-Founder | www.cogilent.com
------------------------------------------------------------
Mobile: +1 415 692 7920
Twitter: @faisalchohan
Skype: faisalchohan
Personal Blog: http://faisalchohan.blogspot.com




On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 7:38 AM, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
> I think it depends. If we were going to start a project in Pakistan
> physically on the ground it is a huge deal. Remote activations it
> probably isn't a huge issue for us specifically, though I wonder about
> people on the ground using the data. Would it be an issue if they were
> not mapping, but just using unofficial map sources.
>
> There are some similar sounding laws in Indonesia, but the
> implementation has been really different. For example 2 years ago a
> law was passed that in summary says if you distribute inaccurate data
> you will pay a big fine or do jail time. We are working closely with
> Badan Informasi Geospasial (the NMA) on this however. The law is a lot
> less scary in implementation in our case than when it first come out.
>
> Can't say that Pakistan will do the same, but it is one of those
> things where I'm not sure what we can do other than wait and see.
>
> -Kate
>
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:43 PM, Mark Iliffe <mark at markiliffe.co.uk>
> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I've just seen this through Twitter, it may be of relevance to those
> mapping
> > in/near Pakistan. The short version is thus; it seems that Pakistan is
> > legislating against mapping which ins't conducted by the national mapping
> > agency.
> >
> > http://dawn.com/2012/11/21/pakistanis-lost-without-maps/
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > HOT mailing list
> > HOT at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
> >
>
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>
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